While the impact of Italian cultural production on Latin America has been well studied, the same cannot be said for the opposite direction in this relationship. This first issue of Quaderni Culturali IILA rightly investigates the direction of Latin America to Europe in cultural relations. It suggests that the persistent omission of this “other direction” must be due to the ineffectiveness of the instruments of criticism such as the ideas of “influence” or “style”. The fact that we do not find an “influence” of Latin American art in Italy is not to say that works of art presenting the same idea of a “Latin American Art” have not played an important role in Italian artistic and cultural life. In order to see “the other direction” of flow, and so dilute the geo-aesthetic nature of the idea of a “Latin American Art”, that is to say, this is not to trace a history of the “influence” of such a local tradition in another place but studying the global dimension of the problem of “Latin American Art” and particularly how this problem meets the specific needs of the Italian artistic system.